BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts Hello and welcome to Homeschool History.
I'm Greg Jenner and I've spent my whole career making history fun on the TV show Horrible Histories and more recently on the BBC podcast You're Dead to Me, although that one's mostly for the grown-ups.
With everyone being cooped up in the house, I thought I'd deliver a snappy history lesson to entertain and educate the whole family, because who says that homeschooling can't be a bit of fun?
This week we're going back roughly 700 years to medieval West Africa to meet Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire.
Now Mansa wasn't his name, it was his job title.
Mansa means king or ruler in the Manding language, so he was just Musa to his buddies growing up.
There's still a country today called Mali, but in Musa's time Mali was a much bigger empire, about the size of Western Europe now.
What?
The gigantic empire had originally been founded by Mansa Musa's great uncle Sunjata, about 100 years before Musa was born.
Now, some of Sunjata's story is legend, and we know this because well apparently, his mum could turn into a big, spiky porcupine.
And that seems, well, unlikely.
Sunjata had been a brilliant warrior who had overthrown rival armies and taken captives and sold them into slavery, which is obviously very horrible.
He'd also taken control of very important trade routes through the Sahara Desert.
And that's how the Mali Empire became mega rich.
They traded in lots of vital resources such as salt for preserving food, spices for making food tastier, copper and, of course, gold.
Thanks to the size of the empire.
By the time Mansa Musa came to power, he wasn't just the richest man in Mali, he was the richest man who has ever lived.
Including the people who own Microsoft and Amazon right now.
Yeah, some people think he was worth about £325 billion in the equivalent of modern money.
Billion with a B. That's amazing.
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So let's get to it then.
How did Musa become ruler?
Well, although he wasn't the son of the reigning Mansa, a man called Muhammad, he was at least related to the great Sanjata.
So Muhammad thought he'd be the best heir to choose from the available young men.
It was a bit of a weird story, actually.
Sometime around the year 1311, Mansa Muhammad sent off a big fleet of ships to go explore the Atlantic Ocean.
Unfortunately, only one ship came back.
So what did the king do?
Well, he said, if you want something doing, do it yourself.
And so he got together another fleet of 2000 ships and he sailed off to explore the Atlantic himself.
And he was never heard from again.
Everyone was waiting for Mansa Muhammad to come back and they kept waiting, and then they kept waiting and it got a bit awkward and eventually Musa realised uh hi everyone, I'm not sure he's coming back actually.
So um, I think I'm your king.
Great, I'm the king, hooray!
Mansa Musa was clever, loved learning, supported libraries and it turned out that he was pretty good as a savvy politician.
So, even though he came to power before he was meant to, Musa ended up reigning for around 25 years without anyone trying to bump him off the throne, which was pretty good, going in a time when throne bumping was very common.
Hey, back off!
One of the reasons he succeeded was because the Mali Empire was very diverse, with lots of different cultures languages, customs and religions.
It could have been pretty tense if he turned up and told everyone to believe the same things that he did, but he didn't.
He said, you can do what you like as long as you pay your taxes and follow my laws.
Mali had more gold than Scrooge McDuck.
To stop foreigners from trying to steal his riches.
Mansa Musa told them all that his empire's gold wasn't dug out of the ground at all.
He said it was grown on special gold-growing plants.
Yup, he literally said money grows on trees.
As well as this, Marleyans often told foreigners that the gold farmers, slash miners, were cannibals who would eat you if they found you sneaking into their land.
It was a clever scare tactic to keep foreigners away.
To control his huge empire, Mansa Musa also had a huge army.
It was said by Arab writers of the time that he had 100000 soldiers, which is an absolutely massive army even by modern standards.
That's about the same as the entire population of modern Wigan.
It's even bigger than the maximum capacity of Wembley Stadium, including if you try and cram extra people into the burger vans outside.
It wasn't all work, work, work for Mansa Musa though.
He loved his glamorous lifestyle.
He was fashionable and charming and apparently very handsome.
As well as being mega rich and totally dreamy, he was also a devout Muslim.
So in 1324, like millions of Muslims before and after him, he went on a religious pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca in what is now Saudi Arabia.
This journey is known as the Hajj.
Of course, it wasn't exactly like the millions of other people who have undertaken the Hajj because well, Mansa Musa didn't pack light.
To accompany him on his 4000-mile trip across the Sahara Desert.
He brought around 10000 people with him.
And enough food and drink to feed them all.
And 12,000 kilograms of gold.
Gold!
You're definitely not going to fit all that in a carry-on suitcase.
During his journey, Mansa Musa visited Cairo in Egypt.
Can you imagine what it must have been like for the people of Cairo to see this huge fancy parade come marching into the city gates?
I'm imagining it was a bit like Prince Ali in Aladdin, but without a singing genie.
Even more exciting to the people of Cairo was that Manson Moser wasn't just flashing his cash.
He was willing to share it.
A lot.
Possibly a bit too much, actually.
You see, sometimes things are valuable because they are rare and gold is very rare.
But when you chuck tons of stuff around, suddenly it loses its value.
Mansa Musa gave away so much gold that he completely crashed the price of gold in Cairo and it didn't recover for 20 years.
It turns out there is such a thing as being too generous.
Don't blame me.
I'm a really nice guy.
In Cairo, the powerful sultan gave Musa a gift of horses and camels to take Musa and his entourage to Mecca, the holy city.
And yes, they all arrived safe and sound.
Hooray!
Hooray!
The sacred Hajj ceremony usually only lasts about 6 days in Mecca, but Mansa Musa was a real culture vulture and he wanted to hang around after Hajj season to learn more and meet new people and hit all the tourist spots to three months later and he finally decided he'd seen all the sights and was ready to go home.
Only the official hajj caravan he'd arrived with had already left ages ago, so now he and his posse of people and camels had to travel back by themselves, and that turned out to be a bit of a disaster.
There were no taxis back then, and even if there had been, you can't get a hundred camels in a voxel astra.
So Instead he had to walk an unfamiliar, unsafe route.
It was really cold and, according to one story, about two-thirds of his men might have frozen to death, along with some of the camels.
This was obviously very sad, but at least the camels meant they had some food for a while.
Sorry, camels.
Also being the richest man in the world, suddenly lost in the middle of nowhere and with tons of gold gleaming in his wagons, meant that Mansa Musa may as well have worn a giant flashing sign on his back saying Please rob me.
Yes, they were attacked several times by bandits who stole all of the gold.
No, no!
Mansa Musa and his men were close to starving to death, but they were saved by a whale.
No, sorry, I mean a dead whale.
Yeah, Meccan historians say that Musa's party found it washed up on the shore near Suez in Egypt, and eating all that whale meat gave them enough strength to keep going.
He's described as arriving in Cairo exhausted and penniless, but triumphantly holding the massive whale skull up in the air at the front of his procession as a way of giving thanks for their miraculous meal.
Or either that, or they were just looking for a massive recycling bin to put it in, you know, because littering's bad.
Since all of Matsumusa's gold had been stolen and he was still 3000 miles from home, he had to go around Cairo asking to borrow cash from the people he'd given gold to in the first place.
Bit awkward.
Fortunately, the people of Cairo were feeling generous, but they expected their money back and they wanted interest.
Some of them even decided they would travel with him back to Mali to make sure that he paid them properly.
And that's a 3,000 mile journey.
And then the other 3,000 miles back the other way.
My feet are really sore.
However, this meant that loads of Egyptians got to go and see Mali for themselves, which was really impressive, especially the big cities like Timbuktu.
Some of them stayed and lived there and some of them, of course, returned home, walking the 3000 miles back to Cairo.
But when they got back to Cairo, they told their stories and wrote down what they'd seen.
And that's how historians now know what Mali looked like back in the 14th century.
Timbuktu still exists today.
It probably wasn't the capital city of Mali, but we don't actually know what the capital city was.
Either way, Timbuktu was super fancy and Mansa Musa had big plans to make it even fancier.
On his travels, Mansa Musa had recruited a load of Egyptian and European architects to add to the splendor of Mali, and they designed an extravagant new throne room for Musa and built seriously impressive buildings.
Talk about a dream job for an architect.
Except he didn't hire an architect.
No, he hired a poet.
The poet's name was Abues Jaquel Sahili.
He was from Moorish Spain and he had no training as an architect, but he turned out to be blooming brilliant.
Fair play.
As well as new buildings, Musa wanted to share his love of learning.
He brought back lots of scholars and religious thinkers and books from his travels.
He also welcomed trade with places as far away as Europe, India and even China.
These were literally the golden years of the Malian Empire.
Sadly Mansa Musa died of natural causes when he was in his 50s.
There were many Mansus who came after him, and some of them did a pretty decent job, but in truth nobody could match Musa's leadership skills, and the Mali empire soon started to go a bit downhill.
However, his legacy continued after his death and modern Mali's first president was of the same family lineage as Mansa Musa, which is pretty cool.
So you might be wondering, well, how do we know all this stuff?
Well, we can read the written reports of the Arab scholars in Cairo and Mecca plus, of course, the ones who traveled back with Musa to Mali.
On top of that, the Mali Empire had people called griots who passed down the history of mansas through singing poetry and spoken stories.
This is known as oral history.
It was something we talked about in the Pocahontas episode as well.
These singing griots still exist today, such as the Senegalese pop star, Yusu Ndor, who sings about other medieval mansas.
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And that pretty much brings us to the end of Mansa Musa's story.
So now it's time for the quiz to see how much you've learned.
Are you ready?
OK, here we go.
Three, two, one.
Question one.
What does Mansa mean in English?
Question two.
Mansa Musa went on a holy pilgrimage or Hajj.
But to which holy city did he go?
Question three name one of the really valuable resources which the Mali Empire traded with other countries.
Question four, why did Mansa Musa have to borrow money in Cairo so he could get home?
And question five, whereabouts in Africa was the Mali Empire?
Okay, let's do the answers.
The answer to question one, Mansa means king or ruler in English.
The answer to question two, Mansa Musa went on his pilgrimage to Mecca.
The answer to question three.
They had traded in gold salt, spices and copper and horribly, human slaves.
The answer to question four, he got robbed by bandits.
And the answer to question five, whereabouts in Africa was the Malian Empire?
It was in West Africa.
Thank you for listening, take care and goodbye.
Homeschool History was a Muddy Knees media production for Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.
The script was by Gabby Hutchison-Crouch, Emma Neguse and me.
The producer was Abby Patterson and the historical advisor was Dr. Sirio Canostone.
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